2011 In Review–Part 2, The Books

Thursday 5th January: 2011 saw a couple of relatively major changes to my reading habits. My regular reader will know that I haven’t bought many new books for a while now – I have had a “to read” pile which, when you add in the books I need to complete series that I have started buying, numbered quite a way into treble figures. Until this year, I had been concentrating on individual books, or series that I had already owned all the volumes of. Last year, however, I started reading incomplete series and if I found that I wasn’t enjoying them as much as I thought, I decided not to carry on buying them. Series that fell by the wayside in this way included Jan Seigel’s Fern Capel (after the first volume) and Orson Scott Card’s Tales of Alvin Maker (after four volumes). I also, for only the third time that I can remember, gave up on a book – The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison. Small changes, but they are helping bring the pile down a bit more quickly.

At the beginning of the year I also bought a Kindle which, if nothing else, is saving me shelf space and making purchasing books a bit easier (at least in some cases – not all the books I want to read are available as e-books yet). I have to say that I think the Kindle is one of the best pieces of kit I have come across. Whether it is better than other e-readers I can’t say, but I have yet to find anybody who doesn’t like it and, while I doubt I’ll ever completely give up on books, I really enjoy reading on it and can see a future when all my fiction is bought on it if available.

During the year, managed to read (or give up on) a total of fifty-eight books and added, either through purchases (anything I bought, I read) or gifts, twenty-five, leaving me with a total of sixty in the to read pile at the end of the year. These figures don’t include twenty-six Stephen King novels that I bought as a special offer from a book club – I really shouldn’t be allowed to drink alcohol at tea-time – and which are still sitting in a box under my bed.

Part of the reason that I managed to get through so many books was my foray into the Paranormal Romance genre, out of curiosity to see what all the fuss was about. I managed to pick up a number of Sookie Stackhouse novels (Charlaine Harris) and the first three Twilight books (Stephanie Meyers) very cheaply. I had previously given up on watching True Blood, the TV Series based on the Harris books but found myself enjoying the books which not only diverged quite dramatically from the TV version but only took a couple of days (if that) each to read. They are, perhaps, the literary equivalent of a Milky Way bar – the books you can read between other books – but are quite fun. I was less enamoured of the Twilight books but decided to read the fourth for completeness and found myself completely hooked by it, desperately hoping that the inevitable didn’t happen and wondering what direction the story would take after it had. I doubt I’ll be dipping my toe into the genre anymore.

My crime reading has also tailed off recently. I haven’t read a Patricia Cornwall for ages but did read three Jonathan Kellerman novels this year. Again, these are novels that I seem to fly through so it’s probably a good thing that crime isn’t my genre of choice as it would probably hurt my wallet more than SF and Fantasy do.

Disappointments in 2011, as well as those mentioned above, included Rainbow Mars (Larry Niven) which I just didn’t “get” and which went straight to the charity shop when I finished it, and the five books of Juliet E. McKenna’s Tales Of Einarinn, a fairly standard fantasy which suffered, from what I can remember, by having different viewpoint characters in each book but being written in the first person which, reading one after the other, left me confused at times.

From the Science Fiction genre, highlights for me were Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Saga, a parallel series to the Ender’s Game series. I originally read Ender’s Game some years ago and didn’t particularly get on with it, finding it hard to reconcile the age of the main character with his actions. I did, however, enjoy the sequels, perhaps because in them Ender had grown up. The Shadow Saga doesn’t necessarily need to be SF, and could under other circumstances just be a completely separate technological thriller series but it was an easy read and, for some reason, I didn’t find it as difficult to accept the very young characters as I did with Ender’s Game. I also enjoyed Alastair Reynolds Century Rain – I have yet to read one of his books that I don’t enjoy – but, in much the same way as Rendezvous With Rama (Arthur C. Clarke), I find myself wanting more. My favourite from SF, though, was something I read way back at the beginning of the year (and which, in fact, only found its way into my collection when the SF/Fantasy Book Club mistakenly sent me two copies…) Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy is a Man versus aliens, navy in space story with parallels to the likes of the Hornblower era. The spaceships of the series have Captains who fill their cabins with fine art and employ what amount to interior decorators among their servants. Reading as slightly satirical in places, there is plenty of action, both in space and planet-side and I found the three books very entertaining. It reminded me of a less brutal version of David Feintuch’s Seafort Saga.

The best straight fantasy I read was Maggie Furey’s Shadowleague trilogy – generic fare but with a slight hint of science fiction entwined in its story. However, fantasy takes many forms and while the urban grime of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station was as good as all the reviews made it out to be and, in my opinion, better than The Scar, its linked but indirect sequel it was Stephen R. Lawhead’s King Raven books which really grabbed me. Not strictly fantasy by definition, they re-write the Robin Hood legend, transplanting one of England’s most well-known heroes to a Wales of a slightly different era. Lawhead gives his reasons in the afterword of the first volume and they certainly sound plausible to me. Most of the standard ingredients of the legend are included and each of the three books concentrates on and fleshes out a different main character (Hood, Scarlet and Tuck, as per the titles).

As usual with these roundups, I have left out many “medium enjoyment” books in order to concentrate on what I really enjoyed. Despite the series I have now consigned to the “Well, I gave them a try” category, there were more books that I enjoyed than that I didn’t (but, then, I’m quite easy to please…) Hopefully, I can continue to chip away at the remaining pile during 2012, getting ever closer to being able to buy newer novels again. You never know, I may even get round to reading those Stephen King books one day…

2010 In Review - Part 1, The Books

Wednesday 29th December: I didn't get round to writing about my year of reading last year so I'm going to get it out of the way first this time.

As most people who know me are aware, I have had a huge "to read" pile of novels, biographies and short story collections for some time now and, therefore, rarely buy new books of those sorts, relying on birthday and Christmas presents to help me complete series that I have already started. That means that I can't have a favourite book published in he last year and the following is limited to what I read in 2010, whenever it was published.

In the last year, I finished thirty-five books, with a final one expected to be completed before the end of the year. I also received eighteen, meaning that the pile should have reduced to ninety-three by the start of 2011. As usual, most of my reading has been science-fiction or fantasy (or at least related to the genre) with only a small-press history of female comic characters - the excellent, if somewhat fannish, Supergirls, by Mike Madrid - being even slightly removed.

Getting the disappointments out of the way first, I have to mention Kate Elliott's Crown Of Stars saga, an ambitious seven volume fantasy series which I found very dense and lacking in action, with a cast of characters that you needed a notebook and family tree to keep track of. Consequently, I seemed to take forever to read it and, if reading becomes a chore, it's obviously not enjoyable. My biggest disappointment, however, was Shelters Of Stone (2002) - the fifth volume of Jean M. Auel's prehistoric Earth's Children saga (in which lead character Ayla seems to invent everything from the domestication of animals to sex). It's been a while since I read the fourth volume (Plains Of Passage, 1990) and the huge gap in publication may have contributed to the fact that all that seemed to happen in this volume was that Ayla and Jondalar finally arrived back at the latter's home cave and reiterated everything that had gone before, before setting up the final volume, due next year.

In terms of fantasy, I'm not going to choose Neil Gaiman's Stardust as my favourite of the year, primarily because I have read it before, albeit in a different format (it was originally published as four "comics" and later collected as a trade paperback, both released by DC Comics). Nor am I going to choose the solid Soldier's Son trilogy by Robin Hobb, which I enjoyed immensely, but only because I read a rare single-volume fantasy by somebody much less prolific, which was superb. War Of The Flowers by Tad Williams may not be completely original but it has enough new ideas in it to be a refreshing read. Part urban fantasy, part "fish out of water" story and part Faerie tale, it provided a new take on the world of the Fey. Exciting in places, scary in others and, it has to be said, obvious in some, it did what a good book should do - kept me entertained (and, at times, amused) for the whole read and I would recommend it to anybody with even the slightest interest in fantasy.

Science fiction has been going through a bit of a boom period recently and I am now catching up with some best reviewed books of the last few years, as well as some older ones. I finished reading my stack of SF Masterworks some time in 2009, so I didn't read any of the so-called classics this year. Perhaps the biggest surprise was Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap cycle, which I completed after reading the first, rather slimmer, volume some time ago. Donaldson has a reputation, I believe, for unlikeable characters and the first volume put me off reading the rest a bit as it contained both the physical and mental rape of one main character by another. So, when I finally got hold of the remaining volumes, it was with some trepidation that I started reading them. Unfortunately, there was still a lot of nastiness but, as the story went on, the target character grew past it and I became somewhat inured to it (perhaps a sign of good writing or perhaps a sign of numbness, I'm not certain) and from struggling through volumes two and three, by the time I'd finished all five, I realised I'd read a cracking if flawed space opera. Indeed, it's space opera that dominates my favourites of the year. Peter F. Hamilton is one of the new British masters of the genre and the first part of his Commonwealth duology, Pandora's Star was almost a sure thing for my book of the year. However, because I don't like selecting parts of a series as my favourite - it's the whole or nothing - it was let down by the second volume, Judas Unchained, which, although containing more action, was more of a struggle to get through, again due to the number of characters and the factions they represented. Hamilton also seemed to have forgotten that having distinctive names helps those of us with limited thinking power to keep track - I mean, three characters called Ozzie, Orion and Oscar... come on! Also, towards the end, the action got a wee bit too complicated and I struggled to keep up with who was wear, fighting with whom and for what. So, my favourite SF novel goes to Matter, the 2008 entry in Iain M. Banks' Culture series. I'm not a huge Banks fan and have found some of his Culture stories frankly dull. This one, however, was brilliant in its weaving together of two stories which eventually came together as one with an ending that was unforeseen and yet, in hindsight, extremely obvious.

My overall favourite book of the year, though, is one I haven't even read yet....

I'm a sucker for coffee-table style books on various subjects, especially the history of American comics. This year was DC Comics 75th anniversary and Taschen published the massive (so big it comes in its own carrying case and would probably cause our coffee table to collapse) 75 Years Of DC Comics: The Art Of Modern Mythmaking in celebration. With text by Paul Levitz, who has been associated with DC for over 35 years, this is a treasure trove of rare art and photos from the entire history of the company. My copy of the book arrived today and I spent most of the afternoon browsing through it and trying to stop the drool from falling onto it. It's a lovely thing to look at and I'm sure that the text will live up to expectations. Well worth the price. (Don't ask...)

Criminally Good Writing

Tuesday 6th January: I'm not a big reader of crime fiction but, every so often, I dip into it. Although I've tried a few authors, I only regularly read two - Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman.

A few days ago, I found myself wondering why crime fiction is so popular. Personally, I find it easier to read than my regular SF or Fantasy, which is why I sometimes turn to it. Conversely, the ones I find myself reading can also be a lot more far-fetched than some of the wildest SF - there don't appear to be many Kellerman novels that concern just one murder and, at the end, the murders, perpetrators and supporting cast all have so many links to each other that you almost need a scorecard to keep up.

However, I had a theory about the popularity that I was surprised to find was confirmed by a story on Kellerman's website, where he tells how, when he found out that one fan, a regular at signings, was a veteran LAPD homicide detective. Kellerman asked the detective why, when he dealt with murder every day, he chose to unwind with novels dealing with murder. The detective told him that the police catch the bad guys 60 - 70% of the time, but Kellerman got them 100% of the time.

The fact is that, despite living in a society in which crime seems an everyday occurrence (and that might be doubly true for Kellerman's fellow Americans), we get a kick out of crime novels because the "perps" are always caught.

I've been concentrating on Kellerman, rather than Cornwell, because the last three books that I finished (and the one I'm currently reading) are his. Self-Defense (1995), The Web (1996) and The Clinic (1997) are the 9th, 10th and 11th books in his series featuring psychologist Alex Delaware. Although he specialises in child psychology, Delaware often finds himself helping his friend LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis in murder investigations. Appearing in most of the books I have read, Delaware's girlfriend, Robin - a luthier, is the only other regular member of the supporting cast. Which, as far as I can remember (it's been a while since I read book eight), made for some very similar books in the past. Sturgis gets assigned to a murder, asks Delaware to help and between them they solve the case. In amongst all this you get glimpses into Delaware's life (the books are written first person, from his point of view) as he drives around interviewing relatives and friends of the victim(s) and, usually at some point, the suspects and eating out at various LA restaurants and deli's and discussing theories with Sturgis, the only openly gay LAPD detective, and Robin. Occasionally, the crimes impact on his private life, as in the last book, Bad Love, when his house was burnt down. You don't have to read these books in order, but they do follow Delaware through his life so the background follows on from book to book.

However, two of these three messed with the format just a little, which made them a bit more refreshing. Self-Defense sees Delaware treating a rare private patient, a juror from a serial-killer in which the accused was sentenced to death. After the trial she starts having dreams about her childhood which appear to show her estranged father and some other men carrying off a woman's body. Referred to Delaware by Sturgis (on whom she developed a crush during the trial) she tweaks his curiosity and he embarks on his own investigations into whether the dream is a repressed memory of an actual murder.

At times, towards the end, The Web feels more like a gothic horror novel than a modern day crime thriller. Taking a working vacation on a remote Pacific island, Delaware and Robin get caught up in a web of lies and deceit around the scientist that has employed them, the island's naval base and big business. There have been two murders on the island, but they are peripheral to the main story and Delaware barely gets involved in the one that occurs while he is there. In the end, with a tropical storm battering the island, Delaware and Robin must brave huge venomous insects to solve clues left for them by the scientist in order to reveal the secret and discover the real reason he asked them to come to the island.

The Clinic sees Delaware once again helping Sturgis. This time a prominent female professor has been stabbed to death within yards of her house. A recent book on female empowerment, together with her work on a university committee and a possible abortion clinic has left her with many possible enemies, but which one committed the crime?

These books aren't action novels - there may be a bit of a chase/shoot-out/set-up at the end of each but, for the most part, they are deeply rooted in the psychological aspects of the investigations. Much of each book is taken up with various conversations and Kellerman having a psychology background himself means that, instead of being dry and tedious, they are often fascinating. As already mentioned, there is a bit of a formulaic feel to the books and the small supporting cast can be a bit restrictive at times. However, Kellerman writes about Los Angeles, whether real or imagined, with great descriptive aplomb. At times you can almost taste the sandwiches that Delaware prepares for Sturgis as they discuss the latest case, or the lunch he has bought at the nice little deli he drives past between interviews. LA is a sprawling city, with its own personality, which means that Kellerman has plenty of scope for locations to describe (although occasional trips elsewhere are welcome).

Despite being written in the mid 90's, sometimes these books appeared a bit dated. There is very little use of cellphones and a comment recently that LAPD were still a little scared by computers, while internet usage still seems restricted to terminals in universities and libraries, rather than at home.

The Delaware novels probably aren't the best crime fiction out there but they are an enjoyable, relatively easy read (despite some of the depravity and callousness portrayed in them). It's going to take me some time to catch up to the latest releases, though.

More Masterworks

Monday 15th December: Best laid plans of mice and men were thwarted on Friday evening when the non-appearance of a bus put a stop to me going out to see the Mojos again. Instead, cold and wet, I wandered home to curl up with my wife and a book. I've got through a few (books, not wives) since my last burst of reviews, so here's a very quick catch-up.

The Centauri Device (M. John Harrison, 1974) is yet another example of 70's SF that I just didn't get. It seems a simple enough story - John Truck, lowlife spaceship captain, is half Centauri and the last hope of defusing/activating a device found on Centaur after a long war. He is pursued across the stars by miltary groups descended from Arabs and Jews in a bid by both sides to get him to use the device for their aims.

Except, I hadn't got a clue what was going on. Harrison's style is overblown and verbose - "A Zen-master of prose" reads a quotation on the cover. Hmm, verbal diahorrea if you ask me.

Non-Stop (Brian Aldiss, 1958) was much more enjoyable. A small group of villagers set out to find "forwards" and find instead that their lives are a lie. The blurb on the back cover hints of secrets, twist and revelations and I was quite surprised to find, early on, that at least some of the characters already knew what I thought I had cleverly worked out. This didn't stop my enjoyment of this book, though as the ending was an even bigger twist than I expected.

Good action sequences, good characters and a plot that has been done a few times since this book was published. Very enjoyable ane one of the best books in the Masterworks series.

Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C. Clarke, 1978) is, in my opinion his best book and this was actually a reread (although in a new format). The science and technology of building the great space elevator is so believable that you can almost reach out and touch it. Add to that the novel's setting (a thinly disguised Ceylon), the mixture of technology and ancient religion (although Clarke frequently comes across as anti religion) and the truly believable characters and you get a very readable novel that should be held up to non-SF fans to show how good SF can be when written well.

OK, it does turn into a bit of a disaster movie derivative in it's latter stages and Clarke can't help but add in a benevolent alien intelligence but this is an excellent novel and one of my top ten of all time.

The City and the Stars (Arthur C. Clarke, 1956) starts of well as Alvin, citizen of Diaspar (the last city on a far-future Earth) dreams of leaving his home and seeing the outside (some that very few Diasparans ever dream of). Falling in with a jester, whose job it is to bring uncertainty to the controlled environment of the city, Alvin discovers a smaller settlement at the end of an old transit line and, eventually, a spaceship in which he explores the stars.

As the book went on, however, I couldn't help thinking of the two I had read earlier in the year by Olaf Stapledon. This should probably come as no surpise as the latter was the author who inspired Clarke, but I didn't like those books and, as this one became more and more similar, I found myself liking it less than when I started it. Which is a shame, really, as this is regarded as one of Clarke's finest works by most of his fans.

Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke, 1953) was Clarke's second novel and is equally as respected. Fortunately, I liked this one a bit more.

Just as mankind is about to reach the stars, huge spaceships arrive over capital cities across the world. The occupants, Overlords, hide themselves from humanity for fifty years but bring about an end to war and usher in a golden age for mankind. When they do reveal themselves, they prove to be the visual equivalent of the Devil, igniting questions about their role in the development of Man. However, the Overlords themselves are only workers for the galaxy-spanning Overmind and it may just be the time for mankind to take its ultimate place in the universe.

This is quite possibly the least scientific of Clarke's novel and falls in at barely 200 pages long. It is, however, full of ideas and speculations, not least on the place the supernatural has in our lives. Images from it have appeared in the likes of Independence Day and V but that just shows, again, the Clarke was way ahead of his time.

Carrolls in November and Keyes to Intelligence

Monday 24th November: Because I currently have so many books waiting to be read, my usual modus operandi is to read everything that I own by any one author, one after the other. There are exceptions (for example, despite enjoying the Alistair Reynolds books that I read recently I haven't read the last one in my pile simply because they were each taking so long to get through) and there are probably reasons good reasons for not doing it, but it works for me. And so, after The Wooden Sea, I found myself reading two more novels by Jonathan Carroll.

White Apples (2004) tells the story of Vincent Ettrich, family-man but womaniser, who discovers that he has died and been brought back to life by his one true-love.

It is also, perhaps, the most frustrating book I have read in a long time. Containing some wonderful characters and sequences (I love the whole idea of the King of the Park), brought to life by some truly magical and lyrical writing, I found it disjointed and, ultimately, it went nowhere. I don't think that I rushed through the book but I still don't know why Vincent was brought back. The cover blurb gives an explanation but I struggle to remember any part of the story which relates back to the blurb.

Like The Wooden Sea, White Apples deals with big questions without giving any real answers but, whereas in the former novel, that didn't seem to matter, in this one it seems to leave an empty space where answers should be. The writing, however, is superb. Carroll's characters are always well-written. In this book, they are exceptional. The first ten pages are used to describe Ettrich meeting a woman and asking her out - how many other authors would take ten pages to do that?? Throughout the book there are snippets of sheer brilliance - a man writing on pills the memories that he knows are about to be taken from him; the description of death, heaven and purgatory; the aforementioned King of the Park - and, while I wouldn't recommend this book for its story, I would definitely recommend it for the writing.

On the other hand, Land of Laughs (1980, this version 2000), Carroll's first novel, is a good overall read. While not having fully developed the dream-like writing style of his later works, Carroll again manages to fill a (short) book with interesting characters.

School-teacher Thomas Abbey's favourite author is Marshall France, a reclusive writer of children's fantasy who died at the age of forty-eight. A chance encounter in a second-hand bookstore leads to a relationship with the slightly strange Saxony and, ultimately, to both of them travelling to Galen, where France spent much of his life, in an attempt to convince France's daughter to allow them to write a biography of the author. Once there, they discover that there is more to the town (or, more specifically, its inhabitants) than first appears.

This is fantasy with a slight edge of horror and Carroll's pacing means that it works extremely well. If the cover blurb hadn't stated that there was something strange to be found in the town, you would get halfway through the book thinking that there might be but never quite being sure. Then strange things start happening and the pace picks up towards a suitably creepy ending.

My version is a reprint in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series and, while some may argue that there is much better fantasy that could have been used in the line, I would agree that this book deserves to be in there. Brilliant stuff.

As is Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966). Originally published as a short story in 1959 (and winning a Hugo in 1960, while the novel won the Nebula award) it uses a series of "progress reports" written by Charlie Gordon over the course of less than a year. At the beginning, Charlie is a janitor at a bakery with an IQ of just 68, but he is about to be the first human to undergo a surgical procedure designed to increase his intelligence. Within months Charlie is a genius-level intellect, far surpassing the team who carried out the procedure and who are monitoring him afterwards. The procedure had already been tested on mice but when the titular Algernon starts showing signs of regressing, Charlie realises that his intelligence may be fleeting.

The style of this novel, with all the words and thoughts being those of Charlie, makes it one of the most moving pieces of fiction I have ever come across. At the start of the novel Charlie is happy in his ignorance. He gets teased by his colleagues at the bakery but believes they are his friends while at the same time hoping that the surgery will make him better so that he can make more friends. As the surgery unlocks both his intelligence and his memories, showing his life with a family that abandoned him seventeen years ago, he comes to believe that he is better than those around him and he becomes less likable. As the inevitable decline happens, however, the reader's ideas of just who Charlie's friends are are turned on their head.

Although written in what could be regarded as a much simpler time, Flowers For Algernon still resonates today. If this story doesn't make you question your attitude to people less fortunate than yourself then you don't deserve the ability to read it. Superb stuff.

Stealing the Wooden Sea

Monday 10th November: At this time of year, I tend to pick easy reads from the rather large pile of books that I have waiting to be read. It helps me bring my average pages per days up (I'm a bit of a closet "statto") and brings the total number of books down a bit more quickly.

Most people I know think that I have strange taste in books. After all, apart from a few forays into crime (generally Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman) and the odd horror novel (generally Stephen King), most of the books that I read involve spaceships, ray-guns, elves or magic. It seems to me that if I read a lot of science-fiction, I get a hankering for fantasy. And vice versa.

However, every so often, I like to dip into "contemporary" fantasy (or, perhaps, magic realism). Stories in which elements of the fantastic sit side-by-side with everyday life. It's still fantasy but I like to think of it as a bit more grown-up than the majority of "epic" fantasy. Proponents of this genre include Brit Neil Gaiman, Canadian Charles de Lint (my personal favourite) and Vienna-based American Jonathan Carroll.

The Wooden Sea (2000) tells the story of Frannie McCabe - forty-eight year old Chief of Police for the small town that he grew up as a rebel in. As the book opens his life has taken a turn for the strange. The ugly three-legged dog that he had "adopted" has just died. Two of the town's inhabitants have disappeared, leaving a beautiful feather in their lounge. His stepdaughter has just got a tattoo. The three-legged dog, which McCabe buried in the woods, has turned up in the boot of his car, with the feather, which also happens to be the exact thing that the stepdaughter has had tattooed on her back. Oh, and McCabe's seventeen-year-old self has turned up in the middle of the night.

Reading back that summary of the first couple of chapters, it sounds slightly flippant. As though the book is humorous. There are funny moments. There are also tender, unsettling and exciting moments. McCabe's town is populated with well-rounded, original and likable characters. The story starts quietly, despite the catalogue of events above, but gradually reaches a page-turning ending, along the way leaving the reader desperately wondering what the heck is going on.

In this book, the fantasy elements come thick and fast and I'm not going to spoil it by listing them. Perhaps the best bit, for me, was the idea that we, human-kind, have been a little on the vain side when interpreting the biblical story of the Genesis.

Unfortunately, despite this being a very good book, it was also a bit of a disappointment. I can understand why the ending is unresolved - Carroll couldn't finish this story in a satisfactory manner any other way - but there are too many unanswered questions throughout the story.

Overall, a good book but not up to the standards of Kissing the Beehive or The Marriage of Sticks. Still, Carroll is definitely worth a look if you fancy something different.

The Thief of Time (2002) was Terry Pratchett's 26th Discworld novel. I'm not a huge Pratchett fan, although I have quite a few of his novels published as special editions by the SF and Fantasy Book Club. To me, he just isn't as laugh-out-loud funny as Douglas Adams' Hitch-hikers books.

The Discworld novels that I have read, however, I have liked. There are a few laughs and more than a few chuckles in most of them and Thief of Time if no exception. In it, the fate of the Discworld is under threat when the world's first truly accurate clock is invented, stopping time and allowing the cosmic auditors in. It's up to Death's grand-daughter, Susan, Lu-Tze and Lobsang (two Monks of Time) and Ronnie, the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse (he left before they got famous) to save the world and, perhaps, the whole of creation.

It's a complex plot, with many, many references and in-jokes some of which I got, others of which I can't believe I missed. I particularly like the character of Susan, reluctant more-than-human heroine and she is joined this time by the two very funny monks. There are some excellent sequences - particular favourites are Susan's meeting with the headmistress of the school she is teaching in and the final battle against the auditors, with the heroes' weapon being...

...well, that would be telling. All I'm saying is that I would have been no good in that fight...

Reading, Listening and a Bit of Drinking

Sunday 2nd November: This is the second weekend in a row when I haven't been to see any bands - not that the opportunity wasn't there, but November could turn out to be busy in terms of music so I took the decision to stay in with the family. So, what have I been up to instead?

For a couple of days this past week, I was working in Norwich. This coincided with the annual CAMRA beer festival in the city and my colleague and I decided to wander along to sample an ale or two (or three, or four, or... well, you get the idea). This was my first visit to a beer festival, even though I profess to being a fan of real ale and like trying different ones. I was a little surprised by the payment method used. On entering the hall, you purchase a "starter" kit - a pint glass (used to hold whatever drinks you decide to try) and a number of "tokens", basically a perforated sheet of paper made up of a number of stamps worth 10p each. Each beer then has a token value for either a pint or a half and you hand over the relevant number of tokens for whatever you are trying. This means that all cash is held in one place in the hall and, to my mind, could work better. At the end of the evening, my colleague and I had a small number of tokens left - less than £1's worth but unspendable unless we went back and bought more and, even then, only by careful planning of which drinks to try. The drinks themselves were priced similarly but not all the same - between £2.20 and £2.80 per pint, if memory serves. To my mind, this whole system would work a lot better if the drinks were all priced the same - say £2.50 a pint, £1.25 a half - and tokens were to the value of £1.25, meaning 1 token per half pint bought. Much easier to work out than counting out twenty-eight small paper tokens once you have had a few drinks.

That aside, it was a pleasant evening. We tried seven different beers, after working out that the pint glasses were also marked with half pints so we didn't have to buy a pint every time. It felt a bit strange drinking halves all night but we soon got used to it. Being honest, I don't think I could remember which beers I tried even if I were to look through the event's programme booklet, but I enjoyed all but one of them to one degree or another.

On the way back to York I heard on the radio of somebody who had received eighty different beers for his 80th birthday and has, so far, tried over 750 different British beers. That's a record worth going for, in my opinion. I really must start recording which ones I have tried.

A few days ago I finally finished Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy - Redemption Ark (2002) and Absolution Gap (2003). I'm not going to write full reviews of them, partly because I didn't make any notes while reading them and partly because I couldn't say too much more than I have in past reviews. Although I read these slowly (normally a sure sign that I'm not enjoying a book) Reynolds writes excellent science fiction. These books are so full of ideas that it is practically impossible to read them quickly. Sentient spaceships; pigs genetically altered to be almost on a par with humans (much like David Brin's Uplifted dolphins); humans genetically altered to be more than human; doomsday weapons; the death of planets; the death of suns; messages from the future; a whole religion based on an accident; mighty cathedrals slowly moving across the face of a moon in order to be constantly underneath the parent planet; far future galactic collisions and, perhaps most challenging of all (for me anyway), the concept of Brane Spaces - multi-dimensional spaces layered on top of each other. All these and much, much more are used to stunning effect to tell the story of a small group of characters, but much larger group of people, against a backdrop of interstellar destruction being wrought against Humanity by the ancient Inhibitors.

The third book, in particular, as the story rushes towards its conclusion, shows how Reynolds uses different styles within one trilogy. Absolution Gap tells its story across three different times and two different planets and the interstellar space in-between. At the end of the trilogy, the Revelation Space universe has been irrevocably changed with many of the locations used in the series being destroyed or totally changed.

At first, I was a little disappointed with the end - a huge, galactic scale war was ended off-page, almost as thought Reynold's had backed himself into a corner and needed a Deus ex Machina device to enable him to complete the story. After a bit a musing, however, I realised that the large scale story had always been in the background. The story I was reading was more to do with the various members of the smaller casts - always involved in the war but only really on the periphery (well, apart from starting it all off in the first novel). Then the ending made sense. I believe that there are a number of short stories and another novel set in the Revelation Space universe, which add to and expand the overall story. I will be looking out for them when my "to read" pile is a bit more manageable.

Since finishing the Reynolds books, I have been trying to get through some smaller, easier to read books in order to boost my total for the year. I'm not going to review them but I have recently just completed a handful of the Doctor Who novels put out by the BBC a while back. I was buying them as they came out but stopped after a while, while the Doctor portrayed was still Paul McGann. The few I have just read are variable to say the least but, in the light of the new version of the TV series, it is vaguely interesting to see the direction that the books were going in, portraying the Doctor as a fallible half-human.

Finally, notes on a couple of the CDs I bought recently. Again, I'm not going to write full reviews but just give some general thoughts.

First up is Asia - Live in the U.S.A. (recorded November 1992 at Chestnut Cabaret, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). This was the seventh show of the Aqua (fourth album) tour, featuring Geoff Downes (keyboards), John Payne (vocals, bass), Vinny Burns (guitar) and Trevor Thornton (drums), with a guest appearance from Steve Howe (guitar). This is a fabulous live recording, the sound is raw and you feel as though you are actually standing in the audience as, at times, you can hear people chatting in the background (thankfully between songs rather than during). Originally, this was one of a three part "official bootleg" series and lives up to that name by not appearing over-produced or tidied up to any great degree.

Apparently, the Chestnut Cabaret was a night-club with a stage for live bands. I have seen it described as a mid-sized room. It no longer exists but sounds as though it could have been a good place for live shows - during the encore of this performance Downes is heard commenting that it's 01:15 and people are still wanting more. Asia are one of my favourite bands (I plan to write more about them when I've had a chance to properly listen to their latest release) but this is the first live album I've bought by them. While definitely a product of it's time - big sounding, keyboard-led prog rock - limited by the size of venue, I consider it to be a very god addition to my collection.

At the other end of the venue scale is Roger Waters' In The Flesh tour from 1999. Originally planned to be held in small venues, tickets sold so well that many shows were upgraded to much bigger locations, despite Waters' apparent disdain for stadium concerts. This two-CD recording is one of those annoying types that, instead of being a genuine representation of a single concert, takes bits and pieces from a number of shows and links then with crowd sounds. Not that you would know from listening to it. I only realised when reading the accompanying booklet.

Without delving too much into the politics and personalities of the members of Pink Floyd (another of my favourite bands), I was a little surprised by how much this concert sounded like a Pink Floyd show. I'm not an aficionado and haven't heard a great deal of the solo releases by either Gilmour or Waters but I did see the recent (shortened) airing on BBC4 of the former's Gdansk show which, although featuring some Floyd songs, was definitely a Gilmour concert. Waters' In The Flesh shows seemed to me to almost channel Floyd and, being honest, most of the tracks on the album are Floyd songs.

Apart from Waters himself, the band comprises of Doyle Bramhall II (guitar, vocals), Graham Broad (drums), John Carin (keyboards, lap steel, guitar, vocals), Andy Fairweather Low (guitar, bass, vocals), Andy Wallace (hammond, keyboards), Snowy White (guitar) and Katie Kissoon, Susannah Melvoin and P P Arnold (vocals). The more musically-knowledgeable may recognise more names from that list than I did.

Overall, a good live album just, tinged with a similar disappointment to finding out that Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous wasn't a true live album.

More Welsh SF

Sunday 28th September: I nearly didn't have anything to write about this weekend. Having had a cold and two very late nights (due to work) during the week, I chose not to join the group for Friday night's visit to the Duchess. I did see Leeds beat Hereford yesterday but, to be honest, I don't think I'm the best football writer in the world. (Cue cries of, "Yes, but you're not the best music/book writer, either!!")

Despite it being two weeks since I last posted book reviews, I was nowhere near finishing the next Alastair Reynolds. I'm enjoying his books but they are quite hard-going. The one I'm currently reading had a short paragraph describing the relative velocities of two objects approaching each other at light speed which I had to re-read a number of times and I'm still not sure I understand it. I wonder if that's why they call it "hard science fiction"... because it's hard to understand?

Anyway, for a few tens of minutes on Friday evening I found myself with some spare time but bereft of said book. There was nothing else for it but to start another one. I chose another Reynolds, but one about a third of the size of his others and with much less dense print.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003) brings together two of Reynolds previously published novellas. Both are set in the universe of the Revelation Space novels and contain aspects of that universe to tell stories unrelated to the novels.

Have you ever worried over a puzzle, gradually getting closer and closer to the answer, but finally realising that it is to hard for you? Only for it to nag away at the back of your mind until you start looking at it again? If you have, you will feel some sympathy with the characters in Diamond Dogs. They form a team, put together by a Chasm City resident previously thought dead, in order to breach a mysterious spire on a barren world. The spire contains a number of rooms which the team have to enter in sequence, solving mathematical puzzles in order to open each door. As they get further into the spire the puzzles get harder, the doors smaller and the time they are allowed to answer the puzzles shorter. A wrong answer, or no answer in the specified time, results in horrific injuries. Eventually a secret is revealed, but it is not the spire's.

On Turquoise, an isolated water-planet inhabited by the mysterious Pattern Jugglers, a communication blackout put in place as a spaceship is detected approaching causes two young researchers to swim with a Juggler, before they have the proper training. One dies and two years later, as the spaceship arrives, her sister tries to get closure by getting to see the Ultras that she believes caused, if indirectly, the death. Thus starts a series of events that changes the world of Turquoise forever.

The Revelation Space universe, while full of standard SF wonders is a dark place. These two stories show somewhat different sides of it. Diamond Dogs is interesting not for the central theme of the spire and its puzzles - any story which can reference the films Cube and Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as Algis Budry's novel Rogue Moon (1960) is well aware of its roots - but for the somewhat horrific ways that it treats its characters. The injuries sustained by them in the course of their explorations are treated in such ways to let them continue. It is the lengths that the characters are willing to go to to try to find the Spire's secret that makes this story one of the most disturbing that I have read in the genre.

Turquoise Days, on the other hand, is a fairly straight forward adventure story with just the slightest of twists. In other hands, perhaps those of an author handling emotion better, it could have been a tear-jerker. But, while Reynolds writes fully developed characters he doesn't really seem to do emotion. That doesn't, however, make this a bad story. It is exciting in places and sheds a bit more light on the Pattern Jugglers and the worlds that they live on, while using the differences between Human factions as its basis. I also have a bit of a soft spot for stories set on oceanic worlds.

Two more stories that show that Reynolds is, in terms of current British science fiction, up there with Stephen Baxter and Peter F Hamilton.

A Rare Bit of Welsh SF

Sunday 14th September: No music for me this weekend (but that didn't mean a weekend without going out - last night, Debbie and I went for a very nice Thai meal at York's Siam House, as part of a friend's birthday celebrations.) It does, however, mean that you get me waffling on about my current reads.

I had taken a few Alastair Reynolds books with me on holiday, intending to get a long way into his output while sitting by the pool. Unfortunately, it took me so long to finish the Starchild Trilogy that I only just managed to start his first novel. Nearly three weeks later and I've finished the first two.

Reynolds is a Welsh writer of space opera. He's had short stories published since the early 1990's and his first novel was published in 2000. He is also a trained scientist - a former research astronomer with the European Space Agency.

Revelation Space (2000)
Although Reynolds had already written about the Revelation Space universe in short stories, it remained unnamed until the publication of this novel. In it, Dan Sylveste, archaeologist is trying to determine what event caused the total destruction of the Amarantin on the planet Resurgam. At the same time, a group of Ultranauts aboard a lighthugger spaceship are heading towards Resurgam in the hopes that Sylveste can help them heal their captain, who has fallen victim to the Melding Plague. Also on board the ship is a cache of weapons, some of which are powerful enough to destroy worlds.

The Revelation Space universe is limited by the fact that faster than light travel is not possible, meaning that voyages between the various planets colonised by humans take years. In the main crews and passengers travel in reefersleep but those left behind age normally. Parts of the universe have also fallen foul of an alien plague of unknown origin. This plague corrupts technology, from the buildings of Chasm City on the planet Yellowstone to the nanomachines used by humans to achieve near immortality. The universe also, once, contained a multitude of different intelligences, but most of these have now vanished and it is the reason why that lies at the heart of the story.

There are so many ideas crammed into this novel that it is hard to do it justice in a short review. Vast spaceships, alien artifacts, nanotechnology, weapons (large and small) and different factions of humanity all vie for space in what is a complex book. I didn't find it an easy read, but for different reasons that I sometimes struggle with older novels. It's not the style of writing, nor the language used, it's the sheer scope of the novel. Once I got properly into it, though, I found it hard to put down and, apart from the slightly bizarre ending, found it a very enjoyable read.

Chasm City (2001)
Chasm City is set before the events of Revelation Space, but is not a true sequel. It does feature the origins of a hunting game which one of the characters in the earlier novel is playing when first introduced and, indeed, I think that the character herself (unnamed in this novel) is seen briefly at the end of the story.

Tanner Mirabel is a security specialist who, after one assignment goes horribly wrong, travels to Chasm City to hunt down Argent Reivich. Arriving at the city, he finds it mutated by the Melding Plague, rather than the utopia he was expecting. Hunting Reivich through the city, he comes into contact with many of the strange factions of humans living there.

Or, rather, that is how the novel starts. By the end of it the origins of the Melding Plague have been revealed, identities have been turned on their heads and Mirabel's dreams (both sleeping and waking) of Sky Haussman, founder of Sky's Edge, Mirabel's home world have been explained.

I found Chasm City to be an easier read than Revelation Space, despite it being full of mostly unlikable characters. Mystery is laid upon mystery and action sequence follows action sequence, making it a much livelier read. The main character, however, is the city itself. As Mirabel travels through the city, discovering its various locations and inhabitants, it seems to come to life.

Like the first novel, the ending is a little strange. In this case, however, it is more a case of having to work out who exactly is who by the novel's end, rather than any sort of implausible ending.

So far, I'm enjoying exploring Reynolds' universe and, with another four books of his in my to read pile, three of which are set within the Revelation Space, I hope to continue doing so.

It's A Lot Less Bother With A Bova

Sunday 31st August: No post last weekend, due to being on holiday in Egypt - very hot but very enjoyable. We rarely moved from the pools and, indeed, only left the hotel twice. I can recommend the Three Corners Kiroseiz resort in Sharm el Sheikh (don't believe the bad reviews on TripAdvisor, I can counter every bad point made).

Being on standby this weekend meant that I couldn't go out to see any live bands so it's back to the secondary subject and some comments on the last few books I have finished. After completing Return To Mars, I decided to read the other two Ben Bova books that were currently in my "to read" pile...

Venus (Ben Bova, 2000) This is another of Bova's Grand Tour novels, set a short time after Return to Mars and featuring one of the characters from that novel in a supporting role. The story sees Van Humphries take on the challenge of recovering his brother's remains from the surface of Venus. Alex was killed two years earlier while attempting to explore the planet and Martin Humphries, his father, has offered a large financial reward to anybody who can return his remains. This reward also attracts Lars Fuchs, previously a business rival of the elder Humphries and it turns out that Fuchs, and Venus itself, are both harbouring secrets.

Another easy read, this novel is perhaps slightly less believable than the Mars or Moon sequences. Bova moves slightly away from the corporate exploration of the solar system as Van is part of a futuristic mixture of Bohemian and noveau riche, self-funding the construction of his own spaceship and paying for the crew. One thing that Bova does do well is to show that, while we are not currently contemplating human exploration of Venus, it is in fact no less dangerous than the exploration of near-Earth space. It may be hotter and covered with and atmosphere of corrosive gasses, but it can't kill you any more dead than the cold vacuum of space. Venus is portrayed as a dangerous planet with just a different set of challenges for any potential explorers.

Brothers (Ben Bova, 1996) Next up was a novel from a bit earlier in Bova's long career. Brothers, in some ways, reads more like a medical thriller than full blown science fiction novel. Helped by a train journey to Norwich and back, I finished this 500+ page novel in a little over a day, proving what an incredibly easy read it is.

In the present, Arthur Marshak is the subject of a "science court", allowing fellow scientists, politicians and others to decide whether his work - a possible medical breakthrough which could lead to greatly elongated lives, if not immortality - can be moved to the stage of experimentation on humans. Entwined among the present day chapters is the story of how the work got to this stage, seen from multiple points of view, including Arthur, his brother Jessie, the women in their lives, Arthur's team of scientists and various others.

I really enjoyed this novel, the characters are totally believable and the whole situation seemed, to me, to be as plausible as it needed to be. That is, I don't think it would actually be possible, but it seemed possible enough for the purpose of the novel. Bova argues well on all sides of the discussion, making this a thought-provoking book. Well worth a read.

On a side note, it seems to me that Bova's publishers need to employ some better proof-readers. I don't think I have ever seen so many inconsistencies as I have done in the last three books I have read. At one point in Venus, the names of the ship being looked for and the one been used to look were changed over while, in Brothers, one character changed pronoun from she to he and back to she in the space of one paragraph, while another character apparently thought it strange to see his name on placards for the first time, two chapters after commenting on the same thing. Things like this don't spoil a novel for me, but they do detract from the story slightly.

After that, the next three books were, to say the least, disappointing and somewhat hard-going.

First up was Dreaming Smoke (Tricia Sullivan, 1999). I'm not sure that I could do a plot summary justice but I'll try. Human colonists on an almost uninhabitable planet are, with the help of their AI, trying to terraform it. They use Dreaming to help. Then things start to go wrong, revolutionaries start causing problems and Kalypso Deed needs to try to put things right. So, what is Dreaming? I don't know. What did the revolutionaries want? Sorry, still don't know. And what actually happened in the end? Not much of an idea there, either, I'm afraid. Cyberpunk is not my thing and this is advertised as cyberpunk coming out of the dark. I'm afraid that it left me in it.

Drowned World (J. G. Ballard, 1962) is set in London after solar flares have melted the polar ice caps, flooding much of the planet and, with the increased heat, sending plant and animal life into a sort of devolution. Most of a scientific team leave London at the beginning of the novel, but three people stay behind. Soon they are joined by pirates who aim to loot London of any treasures left.

The main theme of the novel isn't one of action, but psychology, as Ballard explores how the regression of the planet and its flora affects the mind of the central character, in a way causing him to regress as well. Another of the SF Masterworks, I'm sure that this is an important novel in the history of science fiction, it just didn't do anything for me.

Finally, The Starchild Trilogy (Fred Pohl and Jack Williamson, 1980) is a compendium version of The Reefs of Space (1964), Starchild (1965) and Rogue Star (1969), although in a different order to those publication dates. The books depict a future where Mankind is subject to a totalitarian rule, the Plan of Man, where all decisions are made by the Planner and the Planning machine. Apart from that, there doesn't seem to be a great deal linking them - there are no crossover characters and there didn't appear, to me, to be an over-riding story. Of the three books, The Reefs of Space was the most interesting with the mystery surrounding its lead character keeping me engrossed. However, overall, this was a fairly turgid read, reminiscent of a lot of sixties future-of-mankind, SF. Again, for scholars of the history of science fiction, there is probably a lot to work with but, for a simple modern reader, this had little to keep me interested.

Summertime Reading

Sunday 27th July: The hot Summer weather is finally here, which means sitting in the garden with a good book. At least, it did before we had a family... Still, I've managd to finish another three books.

Antarctica (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1997)
Antarctica basically follows three people as they visit, live and work in the Southern continent. Wade Norton is a Senator's aide, sent to investigate claims of ecological sabotage; X is a general worker at an icebase, disillusioned with his job he resigns and joins an oil company; Valerie is his ex-lover and leader of adventure tours retreading the footsteps of Antarctic explorers. Their stories intertwine and, eventually, converge as the terrorists strike and another faction living on the ice is discovered.

If I remember correctly, I bought this novel before I had started reading Robinson's highly regarded Mars trilogy. Eventually, I got round to reading the latter and, personally, found it quite hard going. Not that I didn't enjoy it, it just wasn't what I was expecting.

Antarctica got vey good reviews when it was first published but, again, I was disappointed. Robinson imbues his novels with huge chunks of real and extrapolated science. This one, set in the early years of the 21st century, needs little extrapolation. His descriptions of the frozen continent are superb and really bring the ice to life, helped immensely by a writer's trip during which he seems to have visited all the areas he incorporates into the novel.

Unfortunately, the rest of the writing is dry and dense. Some full pages of text include just two paragraphs and, at times, the book reads more like a science text or geologists handbook than a novel. Reasonably interesting are the discussions of Scott and Amundsen's famous treks, alongside debates on their sanity but, in actual fact, very little actually happens. It is halfway through before the terrorists strike, throwing characters together as they try to reach safety (bizarrely, stopping off for a bit of fun on the way) and the novel ends with a frsutratingly unsatisfactory ending.

It is, perhaps, indicative of the dullness of this novel that I completed the next two books while I was still reading it. I doubt I'll be buying any more books by Robinson, no matter how good the reviews are.

To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
Every so often I come to the conclusion that I should diversify from the SF and fantasy fare that I usually read and try something different. Usually this means a reasonably lightweight crime novel but, even more rarely, I decide to try a "classic".

To Kill A Mockingbird is the only book written by Harper Lee, which is a shame. Through a series of short happenings (almost vignettes) she paints a picture of a smalltown in the Southern United States in the 1930s. Everything is told through the eyes of Scout Finch and her elder brother, Jem. They are the children of Atticus Finch, a lawyer who is defending a black man against charges of rape. I was under the impression that the law case was the main story of the book but it is, in actual fact, mostly in the background. The novel shows how Scout and her brother discover the world around them, including a mad dog, their first site of snow and the strange Radley family living opposite, against the backdrop of the court case.

The writing is light and humorous, given such a heavy backstory and it is only towards the end of the book that things start to become dark and, at times, dangerous for the Finch family. Throughout it all, though, Scout's humour and inquistiveness shine through. The characters and the town they live in are superbly brought to life and, while there are one or two passages that are dated (if only by referencing things I had no knowledge of) the book has a sense of almost timelessness. A joy to read.

Return to Mars (Ben Bova, 1999)
Bova's sequel to Mars (1992) tells the story of the, ahem, return to the red planet. In the first novel lichen was discovered on Mars and Jamie Waterman thought that he saw signs of intelligent life in what looked to be a wall built in a niche in the wall of a canyon. Now he returns, as mission director, with a whole new crew, to carry on the explorations.

Unlike Robinson, Bova writes accessible science fiction. In a way you can tell that, if you were to scrape away the extrapolation and conjecture, you could actually learn a bit about science from reading his novels. Return to Mars and its prequel are part of his "Grand Tour" series of linked novels, set a few years from now when corporate and private space flight is a reality and man is actively exploring the solare system. Situations, hardware and, in some cases, characters cross over between the novels. So far, I have read the two Mars and the two Moon novels and enjoyed all four.

The cover blurb of Return to Mars, notes that one member of the expedition is unstable and Bova uses diary entries throughout the novel to give hints of what is to happen. Cleverly, he writes his characters in such a way that few of them could be discarded as candidates for the upcoming problems and I spent most of the first half of the novel trying to work out who it would be (I ended up being correct) and, it must be said that if we ever do send a manned mission to Mars I hope the crew are analysed a bit better than this one appears to have been. (Although that could be partly down to the fact that this is a corporate-funded trip with both familial and political members.) However, the actual ending feels a little rushed.

In terms of the whole story, however, the search for Waterman's "wall" only kicks off late in the novel, the first part being taken up with genuine scientific research and the associated dangers of working in such a hostile enviroment. Like the Robinson novel, little happens but it is an engrossing little. When the wall is rediscovered and its secrets revealed, it feels a little pulpy but still works.

This is an excellent book and well worth reading.

Have We Filled Zanzibar Yet?

Wednesday 18th June: ...and another of the SF Masterworks range is completed...


Stand On Zanzibar (John Brunner, 1969)

Brunner's novel of an over-populated dystopic Earth of the early 21st century is probably the most experimental book I have ever read. Although 600+ pages long and containing what are essnetially two parallel plots, it is more than half-filled with chapters that are vignettes showing various aspects of life in the then future, either by following minor characters or presenting advertisements, extracts from other (fictional) books and newspapers and many more disparate items. The whole possibky gives a fuller picture of life in Brunner's imagined future than simply including ideas in the main body of the novel and it is worth ignoring the temptation to skip over these seemingly inconsequential chapters.

The main story follows roomates, Donald Hogan and Norman House. The former, it turns out is a spy who is eventually despatched to Yatakang to investigate claims that one of the country's chief scientists is on the verge of a break through in genetic engineering. The latter is a rising star at General Technics, an American company making a deal with an African nation to take over the management of that country.

Brunner's future is decidedly bleak - the population crisis leading to strict birth controls not just of the type seen imposed in China a few years back (only one child per family) but of a nature which prevents potential parents with any form of hereditary defect from having children. The bleakness makes it even more frightening when you realise how close this future is to our own present, not in the extreme cases but, even so, a lot of Brunner's predictions were very close to the mark. (One line that did make me chuckle was along the lines of the British PM standing firm behind America as the latter started meddling with another countries, politics, while the rest of Europe was a little more guarde.) About the only thing missing is the current fuel "crisis", something which I personally hope will date this blog as badly as our present dates the future predicted in some forty-year-old SF.

Despite the bleakness, there is a degree of (maybe false) hope as U.S. citizens are given the opportunity to move to a "better" life in Africa, even if that life isn't quite what they expect - one vignette follows a young, pregnant couple whose baby is born prematurely shortly after they are relocated to Africa.

Stand on Zanzibar is not the sort of novel I would have picked up if it wasn't part of the Masterworks line (no spaceships, ray-gun's and alien races, although there is a hyper-intelligent A.I.) but I have to say it is one of the better books in that range. Well worth a read.